A People’s History of Computing in the United States

Before computing belonged to a handful of companies, it belonged to classrooms, campuses and public networks built by teachers and students. Joy Lisi Rankin recovers that earlier history, following the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, university networks and school programmes where people who were not engineers learned to write and share software. Archival research supports an argument that computing was once organised around education and common use, and the book asks what shifted once a different story, built around founders and garages, took hold of the public imagination. The case it makes: • Research on time-sharing systems and educational computing networks • Attention given to students and teachers rather than company founders • A counterweight to the standard Silicon Valley origin story • Scholarly sourcing from an academic press For historians of technology, educators and readers interested in how digital culture formed. Published by Harvard University Press and available at Boipoka.